D. Nurkse

In the Frozen Woods

“When I was a child, a fascist came to power, almost on a whim,” she said. “A man who wouldn’t have been chosen for softball coach or crossing guard. Yet the great states fell prostate before him. Heartland of cornfields, iron ore, and oil. Picket-fence towns in grids around a steeple. So there he sat, his finger on the button, like a Fuller Brush salesman about to press a doorbell.”
“How did you fight back?” I asked.
We were old people, walking together in the Institute Woods. It had snowed, then thawed; the ground was steaming like a freshly poured cup of tea. The bole of the oak had the bright black sheen of ink. How long did we have to live? How long until vagueness, how long until the next storm, in the brain or on the horizon? Hours or years? It didn’t matter. I was deeply in love with her, and my feet were wet; that was enough to enthrall me. She walked a little gimpily, her jaw set, her eyes wild. Was she in pain?
“The marches were immense. The human chains, arm in arm from coast to coast. The crowds ringing the Pentagon and the secret police headquarters. In front of every halftrack, every Humvee, the human body lay prone, always a young person, often a child.
“Yet he had the support of half the country, the military, the corporations, the websites, the television stations. Always they were the first to portray him as a buffoon. He will never be elected! He will never rule! And yet he served their interests slavishly, and they his.”
“And how did he fall?” I asked. I came from a distant country, an island in a landlocked sea, a village miles from the nearest road. I knew nothing of her nation, its cities whose neons make the stars invisible, its roads, malls, endless wheat, bauxite, copper, and shale.
“Days,” she said, turning to me, half accusingly, snow bright in her eyelashes. “Days threw him in the pit. And you thought time could only lead to suffering.”